Looking Back Down

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+---
+title: "Looking Back Down"
+date: 2024-11-07T20:29:21-05:00
+draft: true
+description: "Taking a step back to explore my progress in various areas"
+type: "post"
+tags: ["life", "exozyme", "chinese", "writing"]
+---
+
+
+Today, Andy Russo asked me about exozyme lore so I wrote a short wiki article about some of exozyme's greatest (or most terrifying) moments. (The Great Storm Outage of 2023 was insane!) During that process, I combed through old issue and releases and other records and I can't believe how much stuff happened and how much I did. It's like climbing a mountain, endless monotonous drudgery, and then you peer back and you're hundreds of meters above the ground gazing over a vast picturesque landscape below you! (I'll spare you from bad analogies for the rest of this post.)
+
+Sure, most of the work was just tedious bugfixing and exozyme (the server) was ultimately a failure succeeded by exozyme (the community). But I don't think it was time wasted, and instead I learned tons about software engineering, community building, moderation, communication, and more. And exozyme was definitely the largest software project I've ever done and involved writing thousands lines of code. Thousands, really? Wasn't it just installing and configuring some off-the-shelf libre software? Sure, but writing config files is basically coding, and I also wrote many scripts and software for exozyme, such as a Porkbun DDNS client and the Woodpecker local backend. A lot of this stuff was contributed to various upstream projects. It's something that I think I can be proud of. Maybe.
+
+But enough about server stuff. I don't want to think about it anymore. I just want exozyme (both the remnants of the server and community) to keep running smoothly without much personal intervention. If that succeeds, I'll definitely count that as an achievement.
+
+What I really wanted to write about is my journey of learning Chinese characters, which I started around 2.5 years ago. Two flash card apps, 1286 flash cards, hundreds of articles, and two visits to China later, I can definitely say that this journey has been a huge success. My only regret is that I didn't track my scores on [this test](http://hanzishan.com/) for how many characters I know, since I really wish I had a cool graph of my progress over time. For a long time, it always felt like I was reading at a snail's pace, constantly checking the dictionary, getting bored, getting distracted, and failing. But I persisted and the convoluted lines and curves literally melted away over time into bursts of color and meaning. But I didn't notice this in my day-to-day practice. Around a year ago, I was listening to a Chinese song and trying to follow the lyrics, and to my amazement, I could follow the lyrics at the same speed they were being sung! I hadn't tried that in a few months and suddenly I could see the progress right there. Since then, I've improved at a far slower pace, but maybe it's diminishing marginal returns since I'm now learning rarer characters than I was at the beginning.
+
+My last example is that I compiled a list of every nontrivial story that I've ever written for fun (not for school), and three years ago, that list would've had exactly one story, *The Hitchhiker's Guide to Arch Linux*. My list had a length of 26, and that's by grouping together stories in a series as one! Most of them aren't that great and I haven't published, but I'm still shocked that I've done so much. I used to think I didn't like writing, but all it took was playing around with ChatGPT (yes, I'm sorry) to convince me that it can be loads of fun!
+
+It's a really beautiful feeling to see progress since it's not something you can feel on a daily basis. Everything feels locally constant, but take some time to gaze in awe at your global changes!